Interdisciplinary translation studies

If ‘culture’ is a complex term, so is ‘translation,’ too. And yet, there have been literary translations for almost as long as literature has existed. Beginning with the early translations of the Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome and the first translations of the Bible, translation studies has always been based on the practice of translating. Among the most famous theoreticians in the European contexts are Martin Luther (1483–1546), Etienne Dolet (1509–1546), John Dryden (1631–1700), and Alexander Frazer Tytler (1747–1813; see Robinson 2002). The academic roots of translation studies have been situated in (applied) linguistics and/or comparative literature;

however, as a discipline, it has adopted and adapted concepts and methods from text linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and more recently, from history, and cultural as well as postcolonial studies. Many interdisciplines are possible in translation studies.

One of the characteristics of translation studies is that there are no watertight categories for translation. In recent years research into translation has become diverse. However, many reference books seem to take for granted – or explicitly refer to – the tripartite definition of translation by Roman Jakobson (1971: 261). His first category is intralingual translation or rewording. This means

“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language.” Jakobson’s second category is interlingual translation or translation proper. This means “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language.” His third category is intersemiotic translation or transmutation. This category involves “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.”

Roman Jakobson’s use of the word interpretation is noteworthy. Each reading and understanding of any text necessarily constitutes an interpretation. The issue of hermeneutics cannot be avoided in translation. The features of a text cannot be discussed without some reference to text production and/or interpretation (Fairclough 2000: 73). Translation always involves some form of

interpretation. In order to translate a text, a translator needs to make an interpretation out of it. To

guide his or her interpretation, it is necessary that s/he knows both the source and the target linguistic system (the word) and cultural system (semiotic knowledge).¹³³

The term ‘translation studies’, first proposed by James S. Holmes in 1972 (in Holmes 1988) – has become established within the English-speaking world. It was Holmes, too, who presented a “map”

of translation studies, graphically presented by Gideon Toury in Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995: 10). The map divides the discipline into pure and applied applications. The pure side is then subdivided into theoretical and descriptive, and then further subdivided. Nowadays, it seems that most scholars argue that translation studies must be descriptive rather than prescriptive (see, e.g., Toury 1995; cf. Toury 1980, Lefevere 1992b, Munday 2008). “The descriptive and systemic perspective on translation and on studying translation was prepared in the 1960s,

developed in the 1970s, propagated in the 1980s, and consolidated, expanded and overhauled in the 1990s” (Hermans 1999: 9).

In introducing the term ‘descriptive translation studies’, Holmes wished to establish translation research as a scholarly discipline and to lay its epistemological foundations. Later, especially Gideon Toury, Theo Hermans, and José Lambert have been instrumental in reaching this goal and establishing translation studies as an academic discipline (Brownlie 2011: 78). In an article that was published in 1972, Holmes (1988: 71) proposed that the study of translation should seek

illumination rather than to hand down rules on how to translate. It can be argued that “the core activity of the discipline was to be theoretical and descriptive, with any prescriptive orientation relegated strictly to the applied branch” (Brownlie 2011: 77). The objectives of descriptive

translation studies are to describe, explain, and predict translational phenomena (Brownlie 2011: 77;

see also Shuttleworth & Cowie 1999: 38–40), as it actually occurs and has occurred, as part of cultural history.

Typical for Toury and other descriptivists has been that they reject value-laden evaluations of target texts in relation to their source texts. They replace the idea of “X must be translated as Y” by a more descriptive approach: “in this text, which is produced under such and such conditions and constraints, X is translated as Y.” Toury speaks of norms that affect the translation process, from the beginning as the selection of texts to be translated to the real textual choices on a page. Norms lead to generalizations, which, in turn, lead to the formulation of probabilistic laws of translation

133 A good example of this linguistic-cultural-religious knowledge is the term mourners’ bench or mourners’ pew in Light in August (see Section 6.2.4 below). Without a cultural knowledge of the Southern tradition of revival meetings and a knowledge of its use by the Anglo-American religious culture, mere linguistic competence will hardly suffice to find its adequate translation in Finnish – nor will it be accessible to an Anglophone reader unfamiliar with the specific religious culture. S/he would need Roman Jakobson’s “intralingual translation.”

and to the idea of translation universals (see Pym, Shlesinger & Simeoni 2008). A result of descriptive translation studies has been that norms and laws have been understood primarily as constraints on translation rather than something creative and imaginative.

Analyses of translations may reveal patterns of discrepancies between a source text and a target text and suggest some reasons for them. André Lefevere (1992a: 109; cf. Lefevere 1992b: 97) proposes the following rule of thumb: “Isolated deviations are mistakes; deviations that can be shown to follow certain patterns indicate a strategy the translator has developed to deal with the text as a whole.” Related to this, one of the debated issues in translation studies has been the concept of strategy, which basically means an action undertaken to achieve a particular goal in an optimal way.

The term has been used in different ways in translation studies, meaning ‘procedures,’ ‘techniques of adjustment,’ ‘transformations,’ ‘transfer operations,’ etc. (Kearns 2011: 282; see a list by Kwieciński 2001: 121).

Proposals have been made to distinguish between procedural strategies and textual strategies (Molina and Hurtado Albir 2002). Procedural strategies have been used by psycholinguistic and cognitive approaches to translation and have focused on solving problems. Textual strategies concentrate on the results of procedures rather than on procedures themselves. They tend to focus on such issues as free vs. literal translation or on translatability. As such, distinctions between the two strategies are not always clear. Another possible dichotomy is local strategies versus global strategies (see, e.g., Jääskeläinen 1993). Local strategies mean translations of specific language structures and lexical items, units in the text, whereas global strategies concentrate on broader issues involving the text as a whole, such as textual style and omissions and emphasis of specific aspects of the source text (Kearns 2011: 282–284). This division is controversial, too (see, e.g., Chesterman 2005). Other classifications of strategies have been proposed, as well (e.g. Lörscher 1991; Kwieciński 2001; Venuti 2008a).

Lawrence Venuti has worked in the area of global translation strategies. Reacting to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s suggestion of 1813 (see Schleiermacher 2008), Venuti proposes that those aspects of a source text that are foreign to a monolingual culture, such as Anglo-American culture, should be valorized and transferred into the target culture. This foreignizing method is called “resistancy”

by Venuti, for whom domestication has negative connotations. He notes that whereas

foreignization and domestication indicate ethical attitudes toward a foreign text and culture, such terms as ‘resistancy’ and ‘fluency’ indicate discursive features of translation strategies, related to the target text reader’s cognitive processing (cf. Kwieciński 2001: 13–15). For Venuti,

foreignization becomes a genuine strategy of translation, including even the choice of the text to be translated. It transcends literalism. Whereas domestication entails finding a transparent, fluent style

and minimizing the strangeness of the foreign text for its target language readers, Schleiermacher himself preferred a foreignizing practice in a deliberate desire to break target text’s cultural conventions. This means for the reader “the impression he would have received as a German reading the work in the original language.” (Schleiermacher 2008: 50).¹³⁴

However, even foreignizing a translation necessarily domesticates it and allows values of target culture to emerge. Foreignizing translations that are opaque “are equally partial in their

interpretation of the foreign text, but they tend to flaunt their partiality instead of concealing it”

(Venuti 2008a: 28–29). In view of their fuzziness, these notions describe tendencies more than anything else. Foreignization and domestication may be useful concepts, but as such they cannot serve as the basis of a new translation paradigm (Snell-Hornby 2006: 145). They describe a spectrum rather than a binary opposition, and raise the issue of ethics of translation in cultural translation: whether to lean more toward naturalization/domestication, or more toward exoticization/foreignization (Sturge 2011: 67).

An important aspect of culture is the issue of societal power relations. For sociologists and translation studies scholars, individuals are said to have many cultural provenances and to be continually negotiating their position in complex, competing cultural systems. In translation studies, e.g. Itamar Even-Zohar with polysystemic theory (1990), Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (1999) and Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) with postcolonial theory in relation to power relations, and Mona Baker with narrative theory (2006), share this approach to culture (Katan 2009: 87). In addition, culture itself is constantly subject to questioning. Texts and translators can be considered to be carriers of ideologies. This means that even the whole system in which translators work is subject to doubt. Translators work between different power systems that are competing and unequal. They are aware that texts as well as themselves are carriers of various ideologies. The translator becomes an ethical agent or maybe an activist (Katan 2009: 88; cf. Fairclough 1994). His or her decisions as a critical reader and as a writer determine to a large extent the way a reader interprets a text.

Translation from this angle raises many ethical questions concerning power, hegemony, and cultural values (Katan 2011: 73).

Indeed, translation does not take place in a cultural vacuum. As cultural processes entail a constant borrowing and mixing of ideas and practices (Lohmann 2005: 2088), the role of translation remains significant, as translation brings otherness and the other to another culture. It has been clearly understood that “culture is communication and communication is culture” (Hall 1990: 186).

134 “... dem Leser durch die Uebersezung den Eindrukk zu geben, den er als Deutscher aus der Lesung des Werkes in der Ursprache empfangen würde...” (Störig 1963: 49).

Especially in the 1990s links between translation studies and cultural studies became stronger. In their 1990 article André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett called this phenomenon the “cultural turn” in translation studies. They noted that “neither the word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational ‘unit’ of translation” (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990: 8). Culture and the cultural context seem to be at the heart of that statement. The cultural context includes the speakers’ and writers’

social conditions, professions, education, etc. (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990: 4; Snell-Hornby 2006:

47–67). Not surprisingly, such diverse currents in translation studies as descriptive translation studies (e.g. Gideon Toury), the polysystemic theory (e.g. Itamar Even-Zohar), the Manipulation School (e.g. Theo Hermans) with its exact methodology for the case studies, the skopos theory (e.g.

Hans J. Vermeer) focusing above all on the purpose of the translation, and the Göttingen Research Group (e.g. Armin Paul Frank) with its emphasis on transfer-orientation rather than target-orientation can all be included into the cultural turn in translation studies (see Tirkkonen-Condit 2007: 348–349). This has led to a greater emphasis on cultural studies in translation studies involving e.g. postcolonial and feminist/gender issues; the concept of norms, constraints, and rules within descriptive translation studies; ethics, identity formation and ideology; patronage and translation as “rewriting” (Munday 2009: 11). Many works on translation and gender studies, translation and postcolonial studies, translation and minorities, etc., fall within the scope of descriptive translation studies. As religion is part of culture, translations studies cannot ignore religion, either.